Randall Denley: Won’t anyone stop unions and politicians from screwing up another Ontario school year?

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Ontario’s public schools are facing a year of potential labour disruption by the province’s big teaching unions, which as of last week are working without a contract. It’s frustrating and unnecessary.

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The grownups in the government and the unions both say their only concern is the welfare of the kids in schools. If so, maybe they should get new contracts signed so that parents and students don’t have to worry about another year of uncertainty.

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They saw enough of that in 2019-20, when people who consider themselves education professionals engaged in work to rule, refused to help with extracurricular activities, and paraded around with signs.

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The current negotiations are off to a particularly troubling start. Despite having the whole summer to work out a new contract, the unions and the government have accomplished exactly nothing.

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The talks are hung up over a dispute regarding which smallish issues should be bargained locally and which ones should be the province’s concern. Some union locals have better deals than others on things such as professional development and rules for transferring teachers to another school. The provincial government is keen on standardization.

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None of that is remotely important to parents or students, but the unions have asked the Ontario Labour Relations Board for a decision, something that will take months. The government won’t negotiate other issues until the matter is resolved.

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In the meantime, the unions have begun their usual attempt to sway public opinion. Ad campaigns by elementary and secondary schools’ teachers unions are under way, and if you believe them, the province’s schools are crumbling hellholes short of every kind of service.

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The root cause of all this, they contend, is Premier Doug Ford government’s supposed cuts to education. According to the unions, they total a stunning $6.5 billion.

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As Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association president René Jansen in de Wal put it, “The impacts of the $6.5 billion in cuts… are hurting kids. They don’t have the supports they need, mental health supports, the supplies. We don’t have tissue paper in classes. Schools are crumbling.”

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There’s no doubt that a cut of that magnitude would have quite an effect, but thankfully it never happened. In 2018-19, the Ontario government spent $25.18 billion on school operating and capital expenses. This school year it will spend $30.6 billion.

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So yes, the figure is close to $6 billion, but it’s an addition, not a subtraction.

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The non-existent mega-cut is a figment of the imagination of the people at the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). Superficially, their argument is plausible. They say that if government education spending had been increased to match inflation and enrolment growth, the cumulative amount between 2018-19 and this year would have been $6.5 billion more than the government spent.